Nothing against the full cast of KISS ME KATE, which was announced yesterday, but I am very surprised that either Bob Cuchioli or Paul Schoeffler is not playing Fred Graham. In the past, these kinds of prime roles have gone to Paper Mill veterans. Amanda Watkins and Michele Ragusa, for instance, playing Lily and Louis Lane, respectively, are vets. And I recall that Schoeffler sang "Were Thine Thy Special Face" at Broadway Unplugged in November, which caused me to wonder whether he was already set for the role.
So I trecked up to 95th Street on Monday night to check out the 10th Anniversary "gala" for Musicals Tonight at Symphony Space. Interestingly, none of the press releases actually said when the event started. I finally found the info only on the Symphony Space website. I had thought that the event would showcase performers from the earlier productions singing songs from those productions. Weirdly, that wasn't the case. About a dozen actors were put onstage and invited to sing whatever they wanted, though a few did chose to sing either what they sang Musicals Tonight or what they sang to audition for their roles. This made the event feel kind of futile to me, or at lease for an audience member who didn't really know these actors personally. We did, however, see a sneak peak of their upcoming production of HALF A SIXPENCE, which I do intend to check out.
On Sunday night I saw the final performance of John Belluso's THE POOR ITCH, at the Public Theater, which received a two-week run as part of the new Public Lab series. The play, which was not finished before Belluso's untimely death in 2006, is presented in a Brechtian style where the actors openly acknowledge scenes that were not completely, and often juxtapose different versions of the same scene in different drafts. Overall, I found the work pretty gripping and wish they'd work on it further.
So TALE OF 2 CITIES will go to Broadway after all. Two and a half years ago in the summer of 2005, I went to an industry reading of the show. I left at intermission, but mostly cause Act One alone was about two hours. Let's put it this way - I'm impressed it's actually going to Broadway. And I assume what I'll see is very different from the reading. In terms of readings, I also went to a CRY BABY reading in the summer of 2006, at which time the show was undercooked but still showing potential.